Can Gawker reinvent blog commenting?

For years, the Gawker network, which includes Gizmodo, io9, and Kotaku, has fought a battle against commenters, particularly trolls. The huge blog network is driven in many ways by the comments on the site and founder Nick Denton doesn’t like it. He went so far as to call comments on his sites “a joke” at SXSW and said the promise of thoughtful discussion never materialized.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “It’s a promise that has so not happened that people don’t even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership – that’s a joke.”

We can’t wait to see what it looks like. In particular, how they will attempt to bring the discussion around to include rebuttals and rebuttals to the rebuttals is intriguing. Will it work, whatever “it” is?

+Sal McCloskey is a tech blogger in Los Angeles who (sadly) falls into the stereotype associated with nerds. Yes, he's a Star Trek fan and writes about it on Uberly. His glasses are thick and his allergies are thicker. Despite all that, he's (somehow) married to a beautiful woman and has 4 kids. Find him on Twitter or Facebook, SEE MORE ARTICLES BY "Sal McCloskey"